Creating detailed assets for UDK:

Initial stages:

Out of the three assets I was going to make for my scene in UDK, I only needed to sketch out ideas for the Pillar. the wall and the door were modeled from reference from the internet. As I had the basic shape down for the door and wall I wanted to make sure I had a pillar that would fit with the straight lines and rigidness the other two objects had. I sketched up a small selection of designs. 

My original plan was to model a damaged pillar to go alongside it, but unfortunately I didn't have time to do so. That's why there's a damaged pillar on every sketch. After I looked at the selection I drew, I took features from the ones I thought looked the most appropriate and combined them.  It was then brought into photoshop and re sized so that it could be used as an image plane when modeling took place.

Maya:

It was important to me that I modeled everything using as little poly's as possible. I wanted to get the most out of normal maps but not using too much uv space. There wasn't a massive amount of time taken in maya, it was more about prepping the three objects for mudbox as that was where most of my time would go.

The objects were all uv'd and stitched together as normal.

Mudbox:

When it came to sculpting the pillar it wasn't about adding too much to the object. Adding the little insignia on the bottom was important, to give it more of an ornate/ancient look like i originally wanted. The rest of the sculpting was bring out the stone work at the base of the pillar. Making sure there was a number of scratches and age marks was very important, every object had to look old, but they had to look as old as each other. If i had time to sculpt and make a damaged pillar this look would have been easily achievable. When I was happy with the sculpt, I extracted an ambient occlusion map to bring out the natural shadowing on the object, this also made the texturing a lot easier, and assisted in the overall look.

It was important when sculpting the door that the metal had wear to it. Overall I was happy with how the texture in the wood came out too, To sculpt on all these objects I created a stamp tool using photoshop. The stamp was applied to the blank surface first to set shape and act as a guideline. I then went into the object and sculpted in all the individual details using the wax tool.

This method gave a better result than when I last used sculpting in my 3d work, the only issue I had with sculpting that way was the sheer amount of time it took to do it all. The door and the pillar roved rather tame and I sculpted them steadily, but the wall piece took an extremely long time to sculpt. However, I'm extremely happy with how the wall turned out in the sculpt so it was definitely worth it. 

Texturing:

Texturing is something I still need to work on, among other things of course but I feel like my texturing needs to be far neater. Right now I can still achieve results, but I think I'll run into less problems if I tidy it up.  As I stated before, the ambient occlusion maps made texturing far easier, not only could I see the natural shadowing, but I could see where all the ridges and dents went in so I could bring them out with a brush tool.

Normal mapping:

Extracting the normal maps was as simple as extracting the ambient occlusion, However, I had to bring each normal map into Crazybump to lower the intensity, when I brought the normal maps into maya for previewing the strength was far too strong, and it greatly affected the quality of the maps on each object. The normals would give me normals later on unfortunately.

UDK:

Fortunately, the actual importing of all my assets didn't take as long as I knew what to do, once you remember to bring everything in as a package and what file type everything has to be etc it's a lot easier to know what you're doing. My packages were as follows. 

From there, I just made a test scene, created a basic brush to stand on and placed my assets accordingly. Because i made them to scale in maya beforehand there was no need to re size anything in UDK. Which made life a lot easier. From there I put everything together to get a glimpse of how big everything was. 

Once everything was correctly sized I then went into the material editor and combined everything together. To add normals into UDK is easier than I thought it would be. It's a simple matter of importing them like you would a regular texture, make sure it's a TGA file and it imports without issue. The biggest obstacle I had was making the normals show properly. they would apply without any problems within the material editor, but when I put them in the environment the light completely drowned them out and they weren't visible. I had to create a multiplier and a Vector3 tool to strengthen the power of the normal maps within UDK. They had to be increased rather substantially to make them show. I have a feeling there was something I did wrong but That's something for next time. They looked good enough for me to use. 

Once everything was compiled together, i experimented with lights and placed the lights carefully as to show the textures and normals but keep the mood I originally wanted to set at the start of this project. Here are 

the results. 

And to finish off the scene, I added some basic kismet to make the door open, and I edited a sound effect I downloaded from a free sound effects website called freesfx.co.uk and timed it with my door animation in audacity. I added some music from an old game called turok 2 to test atmosphere music and to see if it worked well together, in my opinion it does so I'm very happy with the mood I was able to create. As a level designer that's the number one thing I personally always want to achieve.

However. I am extremely disappointed I ran out of time to do everything I originally wanted to achieve, as my plan was to try and replicate the prehistoric vs futuristic style of visuals there isn't much of a sign here of that. And I feel like I have let myself down somewhat by not achieving everything I wanted to. For the future Planning my time better is an absolute must. I'm happy with the look of what I have made, but I would have loved to make more.

All in all, a fun project, my next one must be bigger.